Panoramic imagery may be captured at a location (e.g., roadway) to create an immersive navigation environment. Images for the panoramic imagery may be captured using a spherical digital camera apparatus having multiple camera lenses (e.g., six camera lenses) directed in multiple directions. PC graphics cards may then process and compile the image textures onto polygon meshes.
Immersive navigation applications commonly specify a spherical view and the polygon meshes are projected and arranged in 3-dimensional coordinates, forming a projected image. Plate carrée projections or equirentangular projections may be used to save the projected image instead of each original image captured from the multiple cameras on the digital camera apparatus.
Plate carrée has become a de facto projection standard for computer applications that process global maps, because of the particularly simple relationship between the position of an image pixel on the map and its corresponding geographic location on Earth. These projections are also handled by application programming interfaces such as OpenGL. An alternative projection approach for the panoramic image is a cubic projection, where four cube faces cover the front, right, back, and left, and one cube face covers the zenith (top) and an additional cube face covers the nadir (bottom).
One difficulty with plate carrée or cubic projections is that the rendering software may generate a larger data file than needed to approximate the panoramic image or sphere. Therefore, there is a continuing effort to provide improved systems and methods for developing panoramic images with reduced data file sizes while retaining or improving the image quality.